Why Odell Beckham is worth every penny of his record contract

Odell Beckham is getting quarterback money. The deal he inked with the Giants on Monday will pay him an average of $18 million per season in new money. The contract includes $56.5 million in new guaranteed money, a NFL record number for a wide receiver.

The NFL is unique in that positional value is the most significant factor when analyzing a player’s financial value to a team. For instance, Aaron Donald is probably the best defensive player in all of football. That does not make him the most valuable.

Aaron Donald was the BEST player in the NFL in 2017, but Tom Brady was the most VALUABLE

Pro Football Focus data scientist Eric Eager, who, along with George Chahrouri, developed the company’s WAR metric, told For The Win in August that Donald’s impact on the game is about what you’d expect from mid-level starting quarterbacks like Andy Dalton and Tyrod Taylor “because the value for replacement level is lower for QBs (quarterbacks are harder to find), so competence/brilliance there is more rewarded.”

Defensive linemen are seen as one of the more precious commodities around the league — the best way to stop a great quarterback is with a great pass rush, the thinking goes — which is made obvious by the bulk of their contracts…

So you’re probably thinking, if Donald isn’t worth the kind of money Beckham just raked in, there’s no way the Giants receiver is worth it, right? Well actually … he is.

Obviously, the quarterback position is the most important on the field, but Eager’s research for Pro Football Focus found that the receiver position is the second-most important in the sport and actually has far more of an impact on the performance of a quarterback than most people realize — more so than an offensive line’s performance, for instance.

“It’s more like facets (passing, receiving/coverage being the highest) produce the biggest bang for your buck in terms of value,” Eager wrote in an email to For The Win. “This manifests itself in seeing QB/WR/DB being the most valuable, all else being equal, followed by DL/LB/OL/TE then RB/ST.”

The way we've sliced and diced it so far it's pretty clearly receiving, and WR/TE most specifically.

Beckham isn’t capable of carrying an offense on his own, but the Giants scoring nearly 50% more points per drive with him on the field is obviously significant. His presence transforms Manning from one of the worst quarterbacks in the league to a serviceable one. The Giants aren’t just paying for a star receiver, they’re also paying for a boost at the quarterback position.

Obviously, the entire offense gets a boost. Since 2014, the Giants have averaged 22.7 points a game with Beckham in the lineup and 16.9 without him. They’ve averaged 49 fewer passing yards per game without No. 13 on the field. Beckham makes that offense go.

How does he do it? We’ll spare you the “he commands double teams” trope. It’s very rare that an NFL defense will actually double a receiver outside of a few key situations. It’s just not possible to play defense like that all game. But receivers as talented as Beckham do impact the kind of coverage a defensive coordinator will call.

If defensive coaches had their way, they’d play man coverage every snap. Specifically, they’d play “Cover 1” man, which puts the free safety in the deep middle behind man coverage across the field (typically with a free defender lurking in the middle). Nick Saban once called it the best coverage in football.

Nick Saban Coverage Philosophy -if two backs in the backfield, play MOF coverage to create 8 man front-trips they are trying to overload no sense in playing split safety coverage does you no good-2×2 split field safeties helps you up the seams-C1 is the best coverage in ball pic.twitter.com/9ZX295eArE

There’s only so much a quarterback — especially one who isn’t a threat to run — can do against good man coverage. If all the receivers are covered, and there’s no where to go with the football, the only options are to scramble, throw the ball away or force a pass into that tight coverage. None of those are particularly attractive options.

But now you throw a receiver like Beckham out onto the field, and playing man — especially Cover 1 — isn’t a viable option. Unless, of course, you want to leave your corner on an island against a human cheat code. This kind of thing tends to happen when a defensive coordinator takes that gamble…

According to Matt Harmon’s “Reception Perception” research, Beckham has complied a success rate of 76.3% success rate against man coverage, placing him in the 94th percentile of the league since 2014.

It’s difficult for Giants opponents to stay in man coverage with only one safety deep, which makes zone defense a more palatable option. In turn, that makes things much easier for the people around Beckham: The less physically-gifted receivers don’t have to beat their men to get open, the quarterback can find voids in the zone instead of throwing into tight coverage, the offensive line doesn’t have to deal with nearly as many blitzes without the defense leaving large swaths of field uncovered, and coaches have much easier time designing route concepts that put stress on the defense in vulnerable areas of the zone coverage. Everybody wins.

With Beckham missing most of the 2017 season with a fractured ankle, the Giants offense didn’t stand much of a chance with its depleted receiving corps facing more and more man coverage. And Ben McAdoo’s scheme, which favored isolation routes requiring receivers to beat defenders on their own, made Beckham’s absence even more glaring.

There are only a handful of receivers in the league who strike enough fear into defensive coordinators to force them to adjust their play-calling, and Beckham is one of them. You don’t just let a true difference maker like that walk out of your building. The Giants are smart for locking their star receiver up, even if they had to reset the market for non-quarterbacks in order to do so.

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Even if Beckham isn’t a quarterback, he’s still worth quarterback money.

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